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JIllian Lauren

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I’ve always loved L’Origine du Monde by Courbet. The first time I saw it at The Musee D’Orsay, it stopped me in my tracks. It seemed revolutionary, even 130 years after it was painted, even after having seen Annie Sprinkle proudly display her cervix on a stage. There’s something arresting about the defiant beauty of it.

I wasn’t going to weigh in on this issue, but I keep driving by a Remember Me billboard three seconds from my house and every time I do, I get pissed off.

I know I’m late to the angry vagina party and that it’s old news by now that Rob Pattinson told Details Magazine, “I really hate vaginas. I’m allergic to vaginas.” But it just makes me furious every time I pass by his giant, lovey-dovey, romancey billboard face and think that twelve bazillion twilit tweens who are already struggling with their feelings about their bodies have to hear that the mere proximity of their genitals would cause their heartthrob to require an emergency shot of epinephrine.

Whoever you are, you came out of a vagina. I don’t care if you’re inclined to be sexually interested in vaginas or not, you should love vaginas regardless. So fight the powers that be and join me in loving a vagina today.

READER'S GUIDE

I Tell Stories

Family Roots December 9, 2014
A woman finds an unexpected new family when she adopts a son, a bad soldier learns to write from personal loss, and a man is working at a nuclear power plant when disaster strikes.http://themoth.org/posts/episodes/1425

Jillian Lauren is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem and the novel, Pretty, both published by Plume/Penguin. Some Girls has been translated into seventeen different languages. Her next memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted, is coming out from Plume in 2014.

Jillian has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine and Salon.com among others and has been anthologized widely, including in The Moth Anthology, True Tales of Lust and Love and Best of Babble Blogs.

She has performed at spoken word and storytelling events across the country, including being a regular on The Moth mainstage, and has been interviewed on such television programs as The View, Good Morning America and Howard Stern.

She is a popular and sometimes controversial blogger at MSNBC, The Huffington Post and Jillianlauren.com, which was named a Top 100 Mom Blog of 2012 by Babble Magazine.

Jillian is married to Weezer bass player Scott Shriner. They live in Los Angeles with their son.